GRANULAR WORK on literature has shown me that there’s no way to stay whole if you are to participate in the publicity spin cycle that enfolds books the way it does everything. Working on translations helps in this respect. You get very close to the imagery and the sentences. You live in a kind of slow motion that reveals that there is no atmosphere, no halo sustaining the sentences. The halo emanates from the cover, not the page. The page is dry, it’s creaking, it’s a desert. No, that’s misleading. What I want to say is that the more you delve into a complex book, the more you appreciate the way it is composed and all the invisible senses it arouses and performs inside your mind — the more you feel the emptiness, the void that stares at you at the bottom of all the wealth. Engaging with complex work takes you away from the possibility of learning things from a book.